BiblioVault - Books about Settlers

Explorers and Settlers of Spanish Texas

By Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph

University of Texas Press, 2001

In Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas, Donald Chipman and Harriett Joseph combined dramatic, real-life incidents, biographical sketches, and historical background to reveal the real human beings behind the legendary figures who discovered, explored, and settled Spanish Texas from 1528 to 1821. Drawing from their earlier book and adapting the language and subject matter to the reading level and interests of middle and high school students, the authors here present the men and women of Spanish Texas for young adult readers and their teachers.

These biographies demonstrate how much we have in common with our early forebears. Profiled in this book are:

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: Ragged Castaway
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado: Golden Conquistador
María de Agreda: Lady in Blue
Alonso de León: Texas Pathfinder
Domingo Terán de los Ríos / Francisco Hidalgo: Angry Governor and Man with a Mission
Louis St. Denis / Manuela Sánchez: Cavalier and His Bride
Antonio Margil de Jesús: God's Donkey
Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo: Chicken War Redeemer
Felipe de Rábago y Terán: Sinful Captain
José de Escandón y Elguera: Father of South Texas
Athanase de Mézières: Troubled Indian Agent
Domingo Cabello: Comanche Peacemaker
Marqués de Rubí / Antonio Gil Ibarvo: Harsh Inspector and Father of East Texas
Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara / Joaquín de Arredondo: Rebel Captain and Vengeful Royalist
Women in Colonial Texas: Pioneer Settlers
Women and the Law: Rights and Responsibilities

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Possessing the Pacific

Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska

Stuart Banner

Harvard University Press, 2007

During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago—choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites.

Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources.

Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.

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Property Control and Social Strategies in Settlers in a Middle Eastern Plain

Barbara C. Aswad

University of Michigan Press, 1971

In this work, anthropologist Barbara C. Aswad presents an analysis of social organization and land control of a Middle Eastern tribal society that has become sedentarized, with particular focus on kinship and marriage and other strategies of mobility. Aswad did her research in villages of the Al Shiukh tribe in southern Turkey along the Syrian border in 1964 and 1965.

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Settlers of Unassigned Lands

Charles McLeod

University of Michigan Press, 2015

In these seven stories spanning the Midwest to California, Charles McLeod brings us characters estranged from their homelands and locked in conflict with their past and present selves. In “How to Start Your Own Midwestern Ghost Town,” an unnamed narrator hatches a plan to capitalize on rural decay. A porn star trying to transition to the mainstream does an interview with a German reporter in “The Subject of Our First Issue Is Art.” In the title story, a closeted heroin dealer follows a ghostly girl into an Oakland graveyard. And in “Rancho Brava,” the conductor of a focus group about corporate salsa keeps getting interrupted by visitors from the Old West. Alternating between the comic, the tragic, and the neurotic—and often all three at once—McLeod’s second collection transports readers from the American mainstream to the dark edges of cities and the heartland’s lost, forgotten towns, into the lives of people trying to decipher if they can escape their pasts, and at what cost.

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Swallows and Settlers

The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria

Thomas R. Gottschang and Diana Lary

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Between the 1890s and the Second World War, twenty-five million people traveled from the densely populated North China provinces of Shandong and Hebei to seek employment in the growing economy of China's three northeastern provinces, the area known as Manchuria. This was the greatest population movement in modern Chinese history and ranks among the largest migrations in the world.

Swallows and Settlers is the first comprehensive study of that migration. Drawing methods from their respective fields of economics and history, the coauthors focus on both the broad quantitative outlines of the movement and on the decisions and experiences of individual migrants and their families. In readable narrative prose, the book lays out the historical relationship between North China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an examination of ongoing population movement between these regions since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

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